Flower Faery Skirt

Little miss Eve recently had her 2nd birthday and I wanted to make her something special. The last few times I saw her she had a tule faery skirt on so I thought I’d make another skirt to add to her collection. (A girl can never have too many faery skirts, am I right?)

The more I thought about what to make and how to make it, the more excited I became – I suddenly realised this was one of my childhood dreams actually coming true. I was going to make the most amazing faery skirt that ever existed, and now that I’m a grown up I can make it however I like! So what would make it the most amazing skirt (From a 2 year old mini me perspective) to ever exist? A few things that were a must.. pink. I loved pink as a wee girl so it had to have pink on it. Petals! I wanted it to look like a real true life flower faery skirt dammit! Velvet.. ahh so pretty! And green leafy bits.

Something along the lines of this.. only more pink, and more leaves, and more skirt like.

Now as you may have noticed in past posts I do love to upcycle, so before going shopping I rummaged around in my box of treasures for some fabric. There I found an old green dress with an interesting texture – I knew it would come in handy ‘some day’. I also had matching cotton. Leafy bits, are set. I had no pink fabric so off I went and found some pink velvet fabric at the shops and cotton of course and I was ready to start.

As for a pattern.. well, patterns are over rated. They’re not really but I’m a bit of a ‘she’ll be right’ kind of a crafter which would explain why things don’t always go according to plan. But in this case it did. I started with the idea that I’d make a wrap around type skirt and workout how I would fasten it later.

Starting with the leafy bits I simply cut out a bunch of rough free-hand triangles and a long thick strip of green fabric to attach them to (like an apron) which will be the top layer of the skirt. I hemmed the edges of each leaf and sewed them to the green strip. As I sewed them I made a small fold in the middle of the triangle to try and make it look more leaf-like.

This is the back of the hemmed triangle leafy bit thingy.. not perfect, but it’s the back so doesn’t really matter 😉

Remembering to always sew INSIDE OUT I have attached the leaves to the strip of fabric. Of course I managed to sew at least one thee wrong way and had to unpick it. You can see here the creases in the leaves as I sewed them on.

This is how it looks (on the back) with the fabric strip flipped up so all the hemming will be on the inside..

..and here’s the green leafy part of the skirt from the front/outside.

That part turned out to be fairly straight forward and I was pleased with the results. Next was to make a strip of petals. I did draw up a stencil for this part by just folding a piece of paper and drawing half a petal, I cut it out and bam – a petal shape. I traced around it along the edge of the velvet, on the inside of course, and cut them out like so:

To make them extra petal-like I folded each one in half and on the back sewed close to the edge to make a crease down the center. As I was fiddling around and sewing away I soon noticed lots of little bits of pink fluff floating about. It was sticking to everything.. ah crap. I was meant to hem them! I thought I could get away with not hemming the edges because it was velvet but I was very wrong. So I zig zag stitched around all the edges of each petal. I’m stillnew to sewing so I’m learning a lot as I go!

Folding the petals to sew the crease.

This is how they look from the back, and below you will see them from the front.

Close up of the petal with zig zag stitching. As I sewed the edges the fabric started to go wavy which I thought added to the petal shape.

I put the two pieces together (leaves and petals) and decided I needed more petals so I made another strip of petals to layer up. I sewed them together and then I was ready to sew on the leaves.

Putting the pieces together.. not enough pink! Need more petals!

Layers of petals all finished.

Now after taking all these pictures you’d think I’d remember to take photos of the last few steps but oh no, of course I didn’t! Bah!

Anyway, I sewed the two layers together and in each end of the green strip I put in a folded piece of elastic and sewed it. I sewed it good. Then I sewed on two buttons, one on the inside and one on the outside, So if you can imagine.. the skirt is wrapped from one side with elastic to the inside button – then the other end of the skirt is attached to the outside button. The idea is that the elastic allows room to grow, and as Eve gets bigger the button can be moved to adjust the size again. Hopefully it will last her a few years!